Animal · United States, Canada
Eastern chipmunk
Tamias striatus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The eastern chipmunk is a small striped squirrel of North American woodlands that carries food in stretchy pouches inside its cheeks. It digs a burrow under logs and stones and hides a winter store in it.
Picture credit: Ryan Hodnett (CC BY-SA 4.0) · James St. John (CC BY 2.0) · Chuck Homler, Focus On Wildlife (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the eastern chipmunk live?
Home: Deciduous woods, hedges and parks in eastern North America.
In the wild it lives in these countries: the United States, Canada.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 13-19 cm long, plus a tail of 8-11 cm. It weighs about 0.1 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
A chipmunk weighs about as much as a bar of chocolate and wears five dark stripes down its back. Its cheek pouches stretch until the head looks twice as wide, so one trip can bring dozens of seeds home. Home is a burrow the animal digs itself, sometimes more than three metres long, with a sleeping chamber, side tunnels and a store room. All through autumn the chipmunk fills that store with nuts and seeds, because unlike a squirrel it does not put on a thick layer of fat. In winter it sleeps in long spells deep underground and wakes every few days to eat from its own larder before curling up again.
Find it on the globe
Eastern chipmunk is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How much can a chipmunk carry in its cheeks?
The pouches stretch so far that the head looks about twice as wide. A chipmunk can pack in dozens of small seeds or several nuts at once before running back to empty them into its store.
Do chipmunks hibernate?
Not in the deep way a hedgehog does. The eastern chipmunk sleeps in long spells in its burrow through the winter but wakes every few days to eat from the nuts and seeds it gathered in autumn.
Where do eastern chipmunks live?
In eastern North America: woods, hedgerows, gardens and parks from southern Canada down through the eastern United States. Each animal digs its own burrow under logs, rocks or tree roots.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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